Ten or many more albums (and even some actual CDs) come across my desktop in a typical week. That’s well upwards of 550 recordings a year to listen to and assess. We aren’t even getting into singles here.

Re-releases or greatest hits packages typically don’t merit mention.

You’ve heard it before and unless something brilliant was done in studio, it’s the same thing in a new package to sell.

However, if you never owned Led Zeppelin III, the reissue really sounds awesome and the clarity of the acoustic guitars and John Bonham’s drumming in Immigrant Song alone make the purchase worthwhile.

There are enough top 10 lists out there to keep anyone online for days. So I’m not doing one.

Instead, I offer up my Top 10 Overlooked Albums of 2014, in alphabetical order:

1. Baptists:Bloodmines (Southern Lord): My favourite local release of the year is also my top metal/hardcore platter. Relentlessly loud, heavy, fierce and focused, this received pretty much across-the-board rave reviews. But it hasn’t been making the year-end lists and I just don’t know why. Honourable mention to L.A.’s Obliterations, whose Poison Everything (Southern Lord) boasts the same qualities. Both groups played a show at the Biltmore I missed which people are still talking about.

2. Bobby Bare Jr.’s Young Criminals Starvation League: Undefeated (Bloodshot Records): You like the Black Keys. You are getting into Gary Clark Jr. You need to hear the fourth album from this boozy, woozy roots rocker. Don’t believe it? Check out the video for North of Alabama by Mornin’ after a shot of bourbon and tell me if you don’t feel like going on a road trip to the swamps.

3. Boonlorm: String Figures (Pocketknife): Falling somewhere in between avant-garde prepared piano experimentations and the forward-thinking electronica favoured by many Warp acts, this disc just never wore out its welcome — late nights, reading sessions, cooking, meditation — a soundtrack to just about anything.

4. Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems (Columbia): The youth-obsessed music business just can’t figure out what to do with an octogenarian who is cooler, sexier and so much more talented than its legions of auto-tuned sales figures. So they put out his new album, let it do its thing and leave it be. Shame, really, as the opener Slow is one of the year’s slinkiest musical seductions, while the closer, You Got Me Singing, indicates he has no appetite for retirement. Cool.

5. D’Angelo and the Vanguard: Black Messiah (RCA/Sony): It’s been 14 years since D’Angelo put out Voodoo. A lot has changed since then, but apparently through all of the personal ups-and-downs and seeming career lows, D’Angelo has been writing some amazing music. This album, which only dropped in early December, is a monster channelling/updating/fusing everything from Funkadelic’s madness to The Time’s meticulousness and more.

6. Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden: Last Dance (ECM): Nine tunes featuring the two jazz geniuses — bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Keith Jarrett — just finding one another with all the space, lyricism and beauty they bring to their playing. Rarely has a classic such as Cole Porter’s Everytime We Say Goodbye sounded so assured in a duo’s interplay. Even Thelonious Monk’s too-often-recorded ’Round Midnight holds some new tricks. The title turned out to be sadly prophetic with Haden’s passing this year.

7. Pierre Kwenders: Le Dernier Empereur Bantou (Bonsound): Born in Congo and based in Montreal’s vibrant electronic scene, Kwenders has produced one of the year’s most pulsing fusions. Mixing the enduring sway of Congolese rumba, Afro-beat and club slammers in tunes as varied as Popolipo and the Cadavere, his debut full-length is certainly a worthy one.

8. Land Observations: The Grand Tour (Mute): Continuing U.K. musician James Brooks’ instrumental travelogues, this one interprets the extensive journeys across Europe that were something of a coming-of-age trip for the posh and educated over the past two centuries. Utterly engaging layered guitars, pulsing rhythms and a not-unsurprising sense of drive.

9. Samaris: Silkidrangar (One Little Indian): What happens when you join up an electronic producer, a classically trained vocalist and clarinetist with 19th Century Icelandic pastoral poetry? One of the year’s most haunting and, well, glacial crossover recordings. Multiple award-winners at home and buzzing across Europe. Visit Samaris.is.

10. Ana Tijoux: Vengo (Nacional Records): And the hidden hip hop gem of the year is this fourth studio album from Chilean-French rapper Tijoux, who proves that rapping about such things as post-colonialism, social justice, environmentalism, feminism and that most thuggish of pursuits, motherhood, could leave most of her genre contemporaries eating her dust. Check Somos Sur (feat. Shadia Mansour) on YouTube for a taste of her world-beat.

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